Abstract
This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary during the period 1949 to 2017, using surnames to measure social status. In those years, there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian People’s Republic (1949–1989), which was a communist regime with an avowed aim of favouring the working class. The second is the modern liberal democracy (1989–2017), which is a free-market economy. We find five surprising things. First, social mobility rates were low for both upper- and lower-class families during 1949–2017, with an underlying intergenerational status correlation of 0.6–0.8. Second, social mobility rates under communism were the same as in the subsequent capitalist regime. Third, the Romani minority throughout both periods showed even lower social mobility rates. Fourth, the descendants of the eighteenth-century noble class in Hungary were still significantly privileged in 1949 and later. And fifth, although social mobility rates did not change measurably during the transition, the composition of the political elite changed rapidly and sharply.
Highlights
Concerns about free-market capitalism in recent years include limited economic opportunity for the lower class and low rates of intergenerational social mobility
What happened to these upper-class and underclass groups, as indicated by their surnames, in the two very different ideological regimes of postwar Hungary: communism and free market capitalism? We show using surnames that there was very slow mobility within the non-Romani population in Hungary across both these regimes, with an intergenerational correlation in educational status that was in the range 0.6–0.8
The result was that even by 2010–17 someone with a surname inherited from the eighteenth century upper class was still 2.5 times more likely to gain a medical qualification than the average non-Romani person
Summary
Concerns about free-market capitalism in recent years include limited economic opportunity for the lower class and low rates of intergenerational social mobility In this paper we look at Hungary, where a fairly homogeneous population experienced two very different political, economic and social regimes between 1949 and 2017 — communism (1949–1989) and free-market capitalism (1989–2017) — and measure whether the regimes had any effect on rates of social mobility. The high-status surnames are first those ending in ..y, which was a traditional upper-class surname type in Hungary as far back as the eighteenth century. We find that social mobility rates throughout were low for both upper- and lowerclass families, with an underlying intergenerational correlation of status in the range of 0.6–0.8.2 Second, there was no greater rate of social mobility in the communist era than in the subsequent free-market regime.. We find that the political representation of the surname groups changed starkly with regime changes, which makes the apparent lack of effect of the transition to democracy in 1989 more striking
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